This past Sunday was the first Sunday of Epiphany, and our songs were gathered with this in mind. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
Mystery by ubcmusic (adapted from Charlie Hall)
SMS [Shine] by David Crowder* Band
Where God Has Always Been by ubcmusic
Anthem by Leonard Cohen
Eternal Anchor by ubcmusic
This past Sunday was the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs were gathered with this in mind. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
All Creatures of Our God and King
Pulse by ubcmusic
There by Jameson McGregor
Wayward Ones by The Gladsome Light
Anthem by Leonard Cohen
Waking Life by Jameson McGregor
This past Sunday was the fifth Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs were gathered with this in mind. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
Come Alive by ubcmusic
Rise Up by BiFrost Arts
Pulse by ubcmusic
Anthem by ubcmusic (adapted from Leonard Cohen)
Wideness by ubcmusic
How They Fit In:
There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme.
Come Alive: This song is about God drawing us into God’s dance of love, gradually bringing us to life.
Rise Up: We sang this song to focus our attention on the vulnerable among us, to orient our concern there, to petition God to come to the defense of the the oppressed, and to form our hearts to do the same.
Pulse: We sang this song to ask the Spirit to remind us of our interconnectivity and to teach us to love one another.
Anthem: This song grasps for hope in despair. Hope for justice to come to governments who trample the weak. Hope for hearts to find their way to love. Hope that light will find its way through the cracks in our fractured world.
Wideness: We sang this song to celebrate the breadth of the mercy of God and to remind ourselves of our tendency to have narrow ideas of God’s mercy.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
This past Sunday was the twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost. Our songs were gathered with this in mind. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find a brief example of one way you might think of these songs. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
Heart Won’t Stop by John Mark and Sarah McMillan
Fall Afresh by Jeremy Riddle
There by Jameson McGregor
Anthem by Leonard Cohen
Pulse by ubcmusic
How They Fit In:
There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme.
Heart Won’t Stop: This song finds its place in late ordinary time as a proclamation of God’s enduring love for us which breaks past the defenses we construct and is unfazed by the depths we might descend in the mire of life.
Fall Afresh: We sang this song to maintain an awareness of our dependence on the Spirit of God to form us in the way of Christ, inviting the Spirit to continue to make all things new in us.
There: This song offered us language to praise the One who is constant throughout all measure of uncertainty, and to anchor ourselves to the Eternal One.
Anthem: We sang this song to maintain a grip on hope in the midst of brokenness.
Pulse: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week’s songs. This is what we said about Hope then: This song is a prayer that God would reawaken us to the interconnectivity of creation, and to teach us to love our created neighbors as ourselves.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM
Yesterday was the fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Our songs were gathered with this in mind. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find a brief example of one way you might think of these songs. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
Heart Won't Stop by John Mark and Sarah McMillan
Rise Up by Bifrost Arts
Anthem by Leonard Cohen
How They Fit In:
There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme.
Heart Won't Stop: We sang this song to begin our time together by directing our attention to God's incessant pursuit of the redemption of God's creatures.
Be Thou My Vision: This song is a petition for God to reframe our sense of vision, wisdom, security, and hope; to give us an overall different lens through which to view the world and our place in it.
Rise Up: This song is a prayer for the trampled of the world, that God would rise to their defense and strike down the systems that attack them, and implicitly that God would form us into people who rise to their defense as well.
Anthem: This is a song about the Light of God entering our world through broken places, and offers us a different way to see ourselves in this broken world.
How Great Thou Art: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about How Great Thou Art then: We sang this song to begin our time together by acknowledging the glory of God in creation, what God has done in Christ, and the ongoing redemption of all creation.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM
Yesterday was the third Sunday after Pentecost. Our songs were gathered with this in mind. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find a brief example of one way you might think of these songs. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
Wandering by Jameson McGregor
There's A Wideness In God's Mercy by Jameson McGregor (adapted from F. Faber)
Anthem by Leonard Cohen
O Love That Will Not Let Me Go by ubcmusic (arranged)
How They Fit In:
There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme.
Wandering: We sang this song to celebrate God's faithfulness to us in the midst of our inevitable falling short of being the presence of Christ in our time and place during Ordinary Time.
There's A Wideness In God's Mercy: This song proclaims that God's mercy is beyond even our most generous definitions of mercy, and offers us a new way to conceive of the way God views us, and challenges us to rethink the way we think of other people.
Be Thou My Vision: This song is a plea for God to be our vision, wisdom, security, and hope in the whole of our lives.
Anthem: This song proclaims that Light finds its way into brokenness, and offers us hope to hold onto in the midst of darkness.
O Love That Will Not Let Me Go: We sang this song to celebrate and cling to the transforming love of God.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM
Our last liturgy was the second Sunday of Epiphany, and the songs were gathered with that in mind. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find a brief example of one way you might think of these songs. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
Death in His Grave by John Mark McMillan
There by Jameson McGregor
Anthem by Leonard Cohen
All Creatures of Our God and King by David Crowder* Band
How They Fit In:
There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme.
How Great Thou Art: As we travel through Epiphany, most of the gospel readings will depict someone acknowledging Jesus as Lord. This song offered us language to join in this posture of acclamation.
Death In His Grave: As we come to know Jesus again this year, this song in some way hits fast-forward on the story, moving on to the Resurrection, but it also contains an extremely important insight: Jesus was executed as a criminal because his teachings and ministry posed a threat to the religious and political order.
There: This song offers us the chance to step back and notice that, though God is present with us in any given situation, God precedes and will outlast any source of anxiety, and the story-we-live-in says that God intends to bring us along to the other side of sorrow as well.
Anthem: In this season of Light, this song reminds us that the Light of hope enters through the cracks of brokenness.
All Creatures of Our God and King: This song echoes the posture of acclamation that we took up in the first song, and offers us the chance to be present to our interconnectivity with the whole of Creation.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM
This was the sixth Sunday after Pentecost. Our songs were gathered with this in mind, and heavily influenced by the selection from Psalm 145 in this week's lectionary set. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find an example of one way you might think of these songs in light of this week's theme. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
Wandering by Jameson McGregor
Up On A Mountain by The Welcome Wagon
Anthem by Leonard Cohen
Lifted/Lifting by Jameson McGregor
How They Fit In:
There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme.
How Great Thou Art: We sang this song to begin our time together with a word of gratitude to the breadth of God's work of creation and redemption.
Wandering: This song allows us to confess our tendency to, knowingly or not, attempt to use God for our own ends, while also praising God for being consistently faithful.
Up On A Mountain: We sang this song as a reminder that Christ has entered into our afflictions, knows the depth of our pain, and that the Spirit is present with us, drawing creation toward redemption.
Anthem: This song acknowledges the depth of the brokenness of the world, and imagines the wounds of existence as the points through which the Light enters our stories.
Lifted/Lifting: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about Lifted/Lifting last week: This song is a plea for God to continue to develop the things we think we already know about who God is, and also to continue to form who we are more fully in the way of Christ.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM
This week was the final week of Lent (Palm Sunday), and our songs were gathered with this in mind. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find recordings from Sunday morning of a few of them, and below the recordings, there is an example of one way you might think of these songs in light of this week's theme. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
In the Night by Andrew Peterson
Here Is Our King by David Crowder* Band
Lord, I Need You by Matt Maher
Anthem by Leonard Cohen
Up on a Mountain by The Welcome Wagon
How They Fit In:
There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme.
In the Night: We will be adding a piece to this song every week of Lent. It traces a thread of struggle through the biblical narrative, ultimately building a case to hold hope in the midst of immense darkness. We recorded a live version of this song last year, which you can download for free here.
Here Is Our King: We sang this song to engage the story of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. As the people who gathered to welcome him in, our assumptions about who Jesus is and what Jesus is about to do are questionable. We can say that we understand that Jesus is going to grasp victory through defeat, glory through humility, etc., but there is still something in us that clings to a Jesus whose power looks like whatever sort of conquering images are engrained in us. We are people who, even though we know how the story of Jesus' death turns out still have to force ourselves to slow down and engage the weight of the suffering and darkness that precedes the Resurrection. And as a result, we rob ourselves of any hope of grasping the profundity of that Event.
Lord, I Need You: We sang this song for two reasons. The first is the same reason that we have been singing it during some of the other weeks of Lent: to remind ourselves that the transformation that we are reckoning with is work that the Spirit is doing in us, and to rehearse offering this confession so that we can find these words in the moments we need them the most. The second is related to the call that is presented as Jesus enters Jerusalem: will we ride with him? Will we walk the path that he is on? Will we follow him to the place that not even he wants to go? If we have any hope of saying yes to any of these, we will need the aid of God.
Anthem: This is a Leonard Cohen song. Which means it is multi-valent, dense, and profound. We sang it at the end of Lent because we are exiting a season in which we know that we are not capable of making a perfect offering out of our lives, whether through being burt out by our lenten practices, our on again/off again relationship to our lenten practices, or our failure to even develop and attempt a lenten practice. Lent leaves a crack in any sense of self-righteousness that we have accumulated over the past year, and makes way for the Light of Easter. This is something I talked about in the newsletter on Friday (you can read that here), which I suppose also led to this song showing up yesterday.
Up on a Mountain: This song jumps ahead to Thursday night in the narrative of Holy Week, where we find Jesus having a breakdown in the garden of Gethsemane. In his loneliness and his fear, we find that we are not alone--that the Christ has entered into the depths of the human condition (with more depths to come on Friday and Saturday), and has met us there.
Be Thou My Vision: During Lent, we depart from our typical singing of the Doxology to close our time together. As we wander the wilderness of Lent, learning more about who we are and what we are for, we carry these words on our tongues, time and again asking God to be our vision, wisdom, and security.
-JM
This week was the first Sunday of Advent, and our songs were gathered around the theme of Hope. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find recordings from Sunday morning of a few of them, and below the recordings, there is an example of one way you might think of these songs in light of this week's theme. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
Rescue is Coming by David Crowder* Band
Hope (There Will Come A Light) by ubcmusic
Anthem by Leonard Cohen
Hope by Jameson McGregor
How They Fit In:
There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme.
O Come, O Come Emmanuel: This song contrasts mourning/longing and hope especially well. We sang it to begin out time together by locating ourselves both with the people of God before the birth of Christ and with the whole of the people of God in our own time.
Rescue is Coming: We sang this song to proclaim the same desperate hope that we established in the first song. Though we may be able to look around and see how dark the world is, we are awaiting the coming of a Light. The "rescue" we talk about in this song is not one of escapism--it's one of an in-breaking that delivers us from the brokenness of creation, not creation itself.
Hope (There Will Come A Light): This song was written specifically for advent at ubc. It focuses on the hope of the coming of the Light, but hones in on what that means for the darkness around us--namely, the inauguration of its progressive demise. This song, as well as the rest of our original advent songs are available for free download here.
Anthem: Leonard Cohen had a way of capturing the essence of vulnerability and existential longing. This song is about hope, perseverance, brokenness, and beauty, all of which are prominent themes of advent. The hope we carry toward Christmas is a wounded one, and that makes it all the more meaningful.
Hope: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about Hope then: This song voices the hope we have in Christ, the fire in the darkness. In this image that comes into the world through John 1, we find the most fundamental summation of the Christian story--God set a light in the darkness that the darkness did not overcome. Fire is more real than the darkness, such that there is no amount of darkness that can overcome the light of the fire.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM
This was the twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs around the theme of breaking/mending. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find recordings from Sunday morning of a few of them, and below the recordings, there is an example of one way you might think of these songs in light of this week's theme. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
SMS [Shine] by David Crowder* Band
Anthem by Leonard Cohen
How They Fit In:
There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme.
Just A Closer Walk With Thee: We sang this song to express a simplified version of what our aim is as we gather: namely, to follow Jesus more closely on the road he has walked before us. As is typical when we sing this at ubc, the second verse holds particular significance in its underscoring of the significance of Jesus' sharing our burdens with us. We are prone to falter in our approaches to faith, but that does not devalue our journeys. This journey is fundamentally difficult, wrought with pain and failure and the pursuit of reconciliation. Which makes sense because this journey is ultimately a relationship, and relationships are marked by all of those things.
SMS [Shine]: This song is an exercise in seeking God in the midst of affliction. It places the truth on our tongues that God is still "Light" when we don't see light, and that we have a sign of life from God in the Person of Jesus, his story and his resurrection. This story is good news for broken people, though it is at times difficult to call to mind and embrace when we need it most. Singing these words helps us develop a habit of claiming this hope that may make it easier to remember when we need it most.
Come Thou Fount: This song asks that God would tune our hearts to sing the story of God's presence in our lives, as well as confesses our proneness to wandering. Perhaps it is in having a clear understanding of the way that God has entered the broken places in our lives in the past that we are able to make it through brokenness in the future. So, like the prayer offered before we sang this song (that will be posted with the Liturgy blog on Wednesday), we has God to flood the dry and broken places within us with a renewed understanding an appreciation of who God has been for us in our lives.
Anthem: There's a lot going on in this song. In light of the other songs this week, we might think of it like this: it begins with a call-back to what Jesus said about birds and worry in Matthew 6, then develops a sense of how the world continues to be an uncertain and imperfect place. In the midst of this development, however, we find the chorus: ring the bells that still can ring//forget your perfect offering//there's a crack, a crack in everything//that's how the Light gets in. It is in the midst of the mess--the brokenness and uncertainty--that the Light makes its way in.
Be Thou My Vision: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about Be Thou My Vision then: We sang this song to practice asking God to override the false, shame-driven, narratives about ourselves that we replay time and again in our heads.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM